Though the proposal has some support from Republican leaders, a push sponsored by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would purport to “expunge” the first impeachment of Donald Trump only has three cosponsors days after its introduction.
Though this limited level of support is not necessarily fatal to the attempted maneuver, there is an extensive precedent of much more support for other early-stage proposals. The initiative’s three cosponsors notably include Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
It’s not clear there’s any kind of real-world precedent for trying to strike an impeachment from the official record. The text of the proposal appears to base its push on the contents of a document held by the FBI that outlines unsubstantiated allegations of corruption against the Bidens, including both the president and his prominent son Hunter. Considering Trump’s first impeachment dealt with his team’s pressure on Ukraine to conduct investigative work potentially implicating the Bidens that could have been politically helpful to the Trump campaign in 2020, the idea appears to be that Trump wasn’t actually basing his pushes for investigations in just politics at all. Instead, the notion is there was really something there.
In reality, no substantiating evidence has emerged to support the notion that Joe and Hunter Biden were recipients of millions of dollars in bribe money each. The nature of the bribery wouldn’t even make sense, because a purported ambition was to help facilitate then-Vice President Biden’s opposition to a then-top prosecutor in Ukraine, where an energy company was based with which Hunter had done some work. It was already the established policy elsewhere in Western political spheres to oppose this official, meaning the bribes would have been a waste of money! And in terms of actual evidence, nothing has emerged proving it actually happened. The FBI doc just formally outlines the flimsy allegations… though Republicans have kept up their clamoring anyway.
